


Tier Magormor Mantorok

by skysedge



Category: Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem
Genre: Body Horror, Flashbacks, Gen, Hallucinations, Post-Canon, Psychological Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-20
Updated: 2020-07-20
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:54:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25402666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skysedge/pseuds/skysedge
Summary: They visit her from time to time. Memories or hallucinations, she’s not sure. It doesn’t matter. Whether she’s reliving visions from the tome or being sent messages from people that are long dead it all ends up the same.She hates it.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 4
Collections: Multifandom Horror Exchange (2020)





	Tier Magormor Mantorok

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Coffin Liqueur (HP_Lovecats)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HP_Lovecats/gifts).



> Hello Coffin Liqueur! I cannot explain how excited I was to see ED on the list for this exchange and it was 100% the reason I signed up so my happiness to receive your assignment was unreal! It also gave me a good excuse to watch a playthrough of the game since I hadn't played in years so honestly, _thank you_.
> 
> I hope you enjoy this little fic and that I've filled your spooky needs!

Alex Roivas feels like an ordinary woman. It seems like she has it all. A four bedroom house in California, sunflowers growing in the front yard, artwork from her kids held onto the refrigerator with magnets from their holidays. Everything in her life is modern and fresh and clean. Everything is exactly the way she wants it. 

Most of the time. 

It’s a Thursday afternoon and Alex is putting away her grocery shopping. It’s been a good day and so she’s not even listening to the radio as she packs away her things. For a change, the silence isn’t uncomfortable. She listens to the soft sound of each fruit as she lays it in the bowl, the crinkle of the paper bag as she scrunches it up for the trash. She slides jars of sauce onto the shelf and shuts the cabinet, not even jumping at the slam of the door closing. Outside the sun is shining, the scent of flowers on the air. The kids will be home soon but she has a little time to herself. There’s that book she’s been meaning to finish, a dumb romance novel whose heroine has no brain at all, or she could watch an hour or so of bad daytime television. Something normal. Something mundane. Something _boring._

“What to do, what to do...” 

Decisions are hard on an empty stomach. She reaches for one of the apples in the fruit bowl and holds it up to the light for a moment, admiring the colour. A deep, dark red, her shadow a vague outline across the shine. She turns it a little, watches the way her shadow moves across the surface, lengthening and shortening like 

_like some sort of shifting monstrous creature from the depths of hell._

_Anthony thuds to the floor as his legs give out under him again and watches the apple tumble from the towering bookcase. The flickering candles reflect back from its surface and round, round they go as it rolls away like so many flickering eyes, round past the fallen books, past the altar, past the body of the bishop, leaving a bloody trail in its wake._

_“It’s not right, it’s not_ _right,_ _it’s...”_

_He cowers back against the bookcase he had stumbled into before, screwing his eyes shut and pressing his hands to his ears. They feel wrong beneath his fingers, misshapen and unsteady like flaps of parchment. A wordless whimper leaves his cracked lips._

_There’s something wrong with his body, it grows weaker with every step and everything hurts, from the upper layers of his skin to the aching marrow of his bones. He should leave this cursed place and find help but he knows he can’t, not yet, not until he’s found Charlemagne and warned him of this evil that stalks in the dark, that rends pious men in two, that whispers in the shadows and echoes screams in the ruined mess of his ears, that-_

_“No more.”_

_His voice scarcely sounds like his own. Still, it breaks his thoughts long enough for him to get to his feet and take the few limping steps over the bishop’s corpse. His dragging foot knocks into the apple on the floor and he finds himself reaching for it, his greying fingers curling around the bloodied fruit._

_He’s hungry._

_Why? How can he be thinking of eating at a time like this? His mind recoils but his body is weak, so weak, and it hungers for anything that can make the pain stop if only for a moment. He raises it to his lips, drawn by the inexorable hunger. His front teeth crumble as he bites down, fragments of bone mingling with the soft fruit in his mouth. He retches, shudders, and the apple falls from his fingers._

_Shreds of the peeling skin from his fingers cling to the red fruit as it_

falls to the floor. 

Alex stares at it in silent horror, her eyes wide and dark and the sound of her thundering heart loud in her ears. She focuses on the sound, lets it ground her in the present, drags her further away from a past she tries so desperately to forget. Not _her_ past. Someone else’s. Someone who had died far too young and far too long ago. 

They visit her from time to time, these memories. Memories or hallucinations, she’s not sure. It doesn’t matter. Whether she’s reliving visions from the tome or being sent messages from people that are long dead it all ends up the same.She hates it. She doesn’t want it in her home. Not _this_ home. This is a place for the future, for her children. She prays to the stars above every night that her kids will never have to feel fear as she has. 

For now, the fear is beginning to subside. She can hear traffic outside, and the AC whirring away in the house. There’s just her, alone, and an apple she’s dropped on the floor. Nothing scary about that, right? 

“Right.” 

She reaches down with a sigh and picks the apple up. It’s probably bruised from a fall like that. So thinking, she raises it to eye-level to 

_to inspect it. It’s rotten, inside and out, just like everything else in this damn dirty place. Maximillian has his hands free today and he’s touched everything in the cell at least twice, every diseased thing that’s moulding in here with him, all the bile and blood and piss._

_They probably left him this apple. The ‘doctors’ here certainly wouldn’t have done it. No, they won’t give anything to a mad old man who won’t give up on the truth, they won’t even give him a minute of their time, they’re all going to die when the end comes screaming in agony, just like he will, just like they_ all _will._

_It’s probably poisoned. Even if it wasn’t rotten it’s no good for eating. He holds it aloft and pushes his dirty fingers into the sides. The skin ripples in reaction, bulges outward. He watches as a worm pushes its way out of the brown pulp, raises its ugly eyeless head towards him and it’s just like they had been, it’s not a worm at all is it, it’s a monster, a parasite, soon to leap down his throat and push out through his skull just like the bone-thief had with the scullery maid._

_But they can’t have him,_ they can’t have him _,_ _he won’t let them, he won’t eat their damn apple but he can use his teeth for something better._

_“Go back to the hell in which you were spawned, you won’t take me, not yet, not until they’ve all been told, not_ today _.”_

_He leans in and crushes the worm’s writhing head between his teeth. It can’t finish him now, can it? It can’t_

can’t live like this.” 

Alex is still holding the apple up to her eye. She knows she must look crazy. Hell, she _is_ crazy, just like old Max. 

“Guess it must run in the family.” 

But she’s not going to let it control her, not like he did. What happened to him was awful but that doesn’t mean she has to be like him. She puts pressure on the apple and its solid and firm, nothing wrong with it at all. She lets out a breath she hadn’t realised she had been holding. There’s nothing sinister here, it’s just a damn fruit, there’s nothing significant to it at all. Not everything has to have some deeper meaning. Not everything makes 

_makes sense. This war is senseless and soulless and cruel. There’s no explanation that can justify the things Peter has seen here. What sense can be found in a small room piled high with corpses? What soul is there in a place of worship once so beautiful now filled with the howls of the dying?_

_It’s cruelty, plain and simple. The depth of it leaves him frozen in place for a moment, one living man surrounded by the bodies of men and boys shrouded in dirty white sheets._

_He had come in here looking for something. He can’t quite remember what. His thoughts aren’t so clear now, not since he had started seeing these_ things, _started finding answers to the disappearances of good men. He takes a step forward, eyes searching for anything that could help him make sense of it all. If the war is senseless then what’s happening here is ludicrous, these creatures take joy in pain and suffering, they..._

_His lips part slowly in surprise as a cold conclusion begins sinking deep into his stomach._

_There’s no human sense in this war. None whatsoever. But perhaps something powerful, something cruel beyond all_ _reckoning ,_ _has a plan that his mind could never comprehend._

_“It can’t be,” he whispers, hands trembling as he raises them to his mouth. “It has to be simpler, something behind the scenes of the governments, some corruption_

and bribery among some officials. Our next story is...” 

The radio chatters on in Alex’s kitchen. Human concerns, social worries. She had once thought that these sorts of problems were the only ones people really had to face, that the darkest truths of all were deals made behind closed doors and the announcements of wars. 

It’s been a long time since she had been able to listen to the news without a sense of dread. She knows now that _their_ hands have been in everything, in every war and every conflict, every assassination and every tyrant, that millions of lives are sacrificed for causes that the people themselves are never made aware of. 

There’s no such thing as a coincidence. She takes a step towards the radio and turns it off, takes a few shaking breaths to steady herself. She needs to get things back under control. She’d learnt breathing exercises, thought processes, if she can just concentrate and... 

But it’s foolish, isn’t it? Why is she even trying to live a normal life when everything in the world is so messed up. She never _asked_ for this responsibility. She just wants to be normal and boring and 

_unremarkable. Life is so dull that_ _Ellia_ _can hardly stand it. She dances and she works and she sleeps every night and wakes every morning and wouldn’t it be more interesting if something was to happen, something like_

_like plummeting down a secret shaft in an ancient temple only to be backed into a corner by shambling corpses, to raise a found blowgun to her lips and drive darts through empty eye sockets, to feel her heart race with the thrill of fear to_

_to lay sprawled and broken for millenia, her body rotting and withering away, a broken husk with the slow beating heart of a dying god deep in her breast, to listen to its laboured breathing outside, to wait and wait for aeons with only the weight of responsibility to keep her here, her mind still turning, her heart still burning for adventure, for_

_for a moment walking again on her own two feet, a spectre in an ancient monstrous city, able to rush towards the skeletal ruin of a man that had claimed her life so long ago and drive a dagger through his breast instead, to pass the burden of responsibility onto this living woman who_

_who sometimes fights with_ _Ulyaoth_ _, sometimes with Xel’lotath, sometimes with Chattur’gha, but always with spirit and fire, always with a righteous heart and a fury, in every universe and every time, the strength of her emotions perhaps the only constant in the shifting and changing faces of eternity and_

And Alex has medication that’s meant to stop her spiralling like this. It’s clearly not working. 

Her head aches and her mind is spinning, filled with images and emotions not her own. She’s so tired of living this way, yes she _is_ furious. She was supposed to have a while to relax and instead she’s been standing in her kitchen while her mind is thrown back and forth through time, through the universe, and she can barely keep control of it. 

But she has to. She has a family, now. A responsibility to them and to the rest of the world. 

“Keep it together, Alex,” she tells herself, bending down to pick up the fallen apple. “You’ve got this. They’ve never got the better of you yet.” 

She places the apple firmly back into the fruit bowl. She’s really not hungry anymore. Perhaps she could lay down until the kids get back, take a breather. How long has she been spacing out anyway? 

The answer comes in a noise from the hallway. A scuffling, like shoes being taken off. The kids must be home. She presses a hand to her chest to calm her heartbeat and peers out of the window. It’s bad if she was spacing out so much she hadn’t heard the carpool drop them off. 

“Welcome home,” she calls, frowning when she sees no car outside. “You guys have a good day at school?” 

There’s no answer. No sound at all, actually. No car in the street and no kids on the path. Standing with her back to the doorway, Alex feels her blood run cold. 

“Kids?” 

Nothing. The hairs on her arms stand on end. She goes to turn but her muscles are siezing up and she can only move slowly, turning her head only a fraction at a time. And it’s too slow, she catches a glimpse of movement in the hallway before it’s gone, like a shadow rushing towards the door. 

Fear grips her heart in an icy claw. Whatever about herself, her children are in danger, her _children,_ and she surges forward in a sudden burst of movement. She races through the hallway – empty, no shoes, no bags, no disturbance – and rips the front door open. 

And there they are. Her kids, on the garden path. They look up at her kindly, beautiful little grins on their faces. 

“You playing a prank?” she asks, out of breath and dizzy with adrenaline. “You know I scare easy, you should...” 

Something’s wrong. The children’s smiles widen. Then they widen again. Alex can only stare as their mouths open and stretch and gape, filling the air with chittering sounds and the cracking of bone and cartilage. 

First, a claw rises out of her daughter’s mouth. Then a head appears through the flesh of her son’s throat. Their skin bulges and stretches like the apple in her vision and two dreadful creatures push their way out of the little bodies in a spray of blood. Two bone-thieves sent by Mantorok, their purple skin sickly and pale in the sunlight. 

“No...” 

The creatures advance, crawling towards her with hunger in their shrieking voices. 

“No, no, no...” 

They tread over the fallen bodies of her children, leaving inhuman bloody footprints on her path. 

“This...” 

It’s over, it’s all over, she’s let everyone down, the darkness is here and there’s nothing she can do and she can’t take it anymore, she can’t, she’s done fighting, she sinks down onto her knees with her hands pressed to her ears and raises her voice in a broken scream. 

“This _can’t be happening!”_

And then it’s not. 

Alex is standing in her kitchen. On the counter, unpacked bags of grocery stand waiting. Everything is modern and fresh and clean. Everything is exactly the way she wants it. 

Most of the time. 


End file.
